Close-up of the book cover. Photo: Courtesy of Paul High.
‘The Offbeat Bible: The old stories retold’, by Paul Hunt
Review by Roger Ellis
Modernisations of Bible stories go back, in English, at least to the eighth-century Dream of the Rood, in which the Crucifixion is narrated by the cross itself. Before the Reformation, such rewritings, supplementing the sketchy narratives of the Bible, generally aimed to increase the readers’/hearers’ devotion. Now the picture has changed: the tone of the rewriting is either comic, like Monty Python’s Life of Brian (1979), or agnostic, like Colm Tóibín’s The Testament of Mary (2012), or antagonistic, like Philip Pullman’s The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ (2010). This collection of ‘old stories’, by a Sheffield Friend, half from the Old Testament, the rest from the Gospels, has elements in common with all these approaches.
There are several reasons why such retellings work, and not just because they can be very funny – as The Offbeat Bible is. One is that readers exposed to constant recitation of sacred stories become deadened to ‘the shock of the new’, as Robert Hughes has it, and lose sight of their radical strangeness. So, looking at the sacred stories through modern lenses, and rewriting them from the perspective of bystanders, can jolt readers into asking what the first readers must have made of them – and how credible their truth claims are, since, like the many figures in the Gospels, Hunt’s narrators understand very differently the events they are part of.
It’s a characteristic of such retellings, as of other, non-biblical religious narratives – the characters in Graham Greene’s stories, for instance – that narrators react to the divine events broadly in one of three ways. In the first they are overwhelmed and changed by them. Or, secondly, they remain curious, even indifferent. In the third case they are outspokenly critical. They are given such opposing reactions so as to force the reader to choose between them (since faith, finally a matter of choice, is first a question of understanding, not of ethics).
The third and most interesting of these reactions appears several times in the characters of The Offbeat Bible. Most important is Satan – the ‘civil serpent’ – whom God twice engages (!) to tempt Eve and Job. For his third appearance, in the temptation of Christ, Satan argues he’s been given an unfair press in the books written about him, especially the Bible. In ‘Propheteering’, another hostile voice describes Elijah’s claim that he was fed by ravens (so ‘it is said’, he says with obvious irony) as ‘a good party trick… I’m sceptical’, and thinks the water that Elijah poured over the altar when he defeated the prophets of Baal (1 Kings 18:20-40) might have been ‘volatile oil from… Arabia’. Then there is the goatherd who narrates two stories relating to Moses, and tells how Moses returned from his encounter with God on Mount Sinai (Exodus 32:15-16) with the stone slabs ‘written on by the finger of God Himself (he [Moses] said)’. Here, in the absence of italics or quotation marks, the phrase ‘he said’ may simply acknowledge that most of the Bible is reported narrative, and readers have to take it on trust (or not). Lastly, there is the armourer/squire of Goliath, who doesn’t expect great things in future from the boy David, since ‘I can’t remember when anyone very impressive ever came out of Bethlehem’ (this reworking of John 1:46, of whose full significance the narrator is ignorant, is a lovely touch).
In keeping with the New Testament stories, many of the narrators of The Offbeat Bible are ordinary people. This contrasts with the characters in Dorothy L Sayers’ The Man Born to be King (broadcast 1941-42), though not, I seem to remember, with the narrator of Bernard Miles’ God’s Brainwave (1970). Hunt’s characters speak, for the most part, in contemporary idiom, with a fair sprinkling of Cockney slang. Of the invented characters, there’s a very interesting one in the gay hairdresser, who, some time after the events, retells the story of Samson, concluding that if he’d had the doing of Samson’s hair for him things ‘would have turned out very differently’.
In narratives which, as these do, operate in a time that is neither biblical nor ours, but something in between, we don’t need to trouble about complete consistency of first-person perspective, any more than the Gospels themselves, which don’t explain, for example, how the writer knows about Jesus’ lone agony in the garden of Gethsemane (Luke 22:43-44). Hence, anachronistically, the narrators sometimes quote the words of Jesus from the King James version of the Bible. Similarly, several of the parables are retold not by Jesus but by a character in the story. I find this a wonderfully (post)modern way of arguing that every part of the Bible operates, on some level, as a form of ‘holy fiction’, and that we need make no distinction between the story of the prodigal son and Christ’s promise to the good thief that he will be that very day with him in Paradise (Luke 23:43). Attempts to produce a completely realist fiction therefore aren’t needed, and sometimes founder, as in the retelling of the parable of the prodigal son by his mother (‘The Mother’s Tale’), who has to employ one of her serving maids (and the maid’s brother!) to monitor for her the prodigal’s fortunes in a ‘far country’.
The book settles once, quite brilliantly, for a small dramatic scene (‘Just following orders’), in which the soldiers crucifying Christ are given their orders by the centurion. As in the fifteenth-century York play of the Crucifixion, the focus is almost entirely on a job to be done, and the one soldier who is unsure about crucifying someone claiming to be a god is promptly put in his place by his superior: ‘If he was a god… do you think he would let himself be executed?’ The dialogue of faith and unbelief has never been more crisply expressed.
If I have a regret, it is that a book which so cleverly revisits the drama of salvation, so as to insist that salvation is available to all human beings, didn’t extend the offer of salvation to animals (as in GK Chesterton’s ‘The Donkey’). The Bible itself must take some of the blame for this narrow theological focus, since it uses non-human beings only as narrative props or symbols of its story. Well, hey (as one of Hunt’s characters might have said), nobody’s perfect.
People familiar with the Bible stories will find much to amuse them and give them matter for reflection in The Offbeat Bible. Others may find it difficult to make their way between the layers of narrative and end up wondering what all the fuss was about, a bit like the goatherd in ‘Goatherd 1’ who hears Moses’ words to God (Exodus 3), but can’t hear God’s words in reply. Maybe, though, their curiosity will be piqued by the retellings, which always refer them to their biblical sources, to see what the originals, at least in one or another modern version, had to say for themselves.
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The Offbeat Bible is self-published and can only be purchased from the author, Paul Hunt, who can be contacted at paulhunt47@talktalk.net.
